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Title: Proof of the Illuminati by Seth Payson ISBN: 1-931468-14-1 Publisher: Invisible College Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3 (3 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Far-reaching, but interesting
Comment: This book starts by starting some known facts about the Illuminati. This was an actual group in Bavaria that infiltrated some of the Masonic lodges and actively subverted them to their own ends. They definitely did not have the good of society in their interests, unless one considers personal aggrandizement of a few individuals a good thing.
The book then attempts to connect the Illuminati to all manner of other organizations; this is sometimes plausible, but often a bit sketchy. Some of this works -- there is a criticism of Diderot's famous Encyclopedia. The Encyclopedia produced a maelstrom of such accusations when it came out, and, despite its vaunted technical prowess, it had copied heavily from existing works. It's (the Encylopedia) flaws are many, and subversive cross-referencing is believable.
The book details all manner of horrible events, especially some connected with the Terrors of the French Revolution. That this is the work of the Illuminati as a society is obviously false; but, the book maintains that the premises of the Illuminati are at work here, even though they are going on under a different name. It is plausible, if a far-fetched. If one reads it as the *ideas* of the Illuminati are now at work in the world, then it is plausible, but claiming that there is a vast conspiracy doesn't hold up so well.
Lastly, the book has a political rant that could practically be inserted into a modern newspaper with but a few names and places changed. The author, Payson, is for the Alien and Sedition Acts (shades of the Patriot Act). He is against partisan politics, and feels that special interest groups, such as the illuminati, have far to great a power in the U.S. government.
Rating: 1
Summary: In error
Comment: It's sad that there are so many books filled with mis-information. This is certainly one of them.
Rating: 3
Summary: Fascinating, but of historical value only
Comment: Payson's is an interesting book, but its major value lies in its existence as a re-issue of a historical American piece of polemical writing then any independent literary or factual merit.
Composed toward the conclusion of the 'illuminati scare' in New England (1798-1802) under the title 'Proofs of the Real Existence and Dangerous Tendency of Illuminism, etc.' (Charleston 1802), Payson's text demonstrates all the hallmarks of being a severely biased and polemical work. Internal evidence betrays its origins in a distinct anti-masonic intellectual milieu, and Payson takes significant care to refute a number of contemporaneous pamphleteers who supported masonry in the face of the Illuminist Hysteria, such as the aptly named Thaddeus Mason Harris.
In terms of its treatment of Weishaupt's Illuminati, Payson naturally borrows heavily from the influential books of Barruel and Robison, the arrival of which in New England sparked the hysteria in the first place. The summation presented is adequate and concise, and Payson adds a few flourishes of his own, which, in a work which is more fiction than fact anyway, fit right in.
A major stumbling point for the author comes in his attempt to provide the 'proofs' mentioned in the title. It is established fact to Payson that the Illuminati were in New England. To this end a citation of the sermons of Morse, Harris and Timothy Dwight's masterpiece of alarmist oratory, are invoked. But is this really the case? While Stauffer's careful and fascinating deconstruction of the panic puts paid to the objective reality of such an assertion, Payson himself draws on other polemical pamphlets of the furore as if they were objective gold. The result is quite comical, and the fact that so many people could be convinced by such slight 'proofs' provides a fascinating insight into the paranoid culture of early New England society. Incidentally, Richard Hofstadter has dealt in depth with this aspect of the incident in his 'The Paranoid Style in American Politics.'
This is a significantly interesting work to read in light of Vernon Stauffer's _New England and the Bavarian Illuminati_ (1918), but is of a low merit otherwise. I do, however, applaud ICP's decision to reprint it, even if it is marketed in a significantly more sinister vein than the content of the work itself warrants.
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